Imperial Rivalry Research Articles

Cartography and Narrative in the Maps of Herman Moll’s The World Described

Herman Moll (c. 1654-1732) was the most renowned cartographer in early 18th-century Britain and his large double-sheet atlas, The World Described, first published in 1709 and expanded during Moll’s lifetime and even after his death, was the most important folio atlas of its day. While historians like Dennis Reinhartz have discussed the presence of Moll’s maps in encyclopedic geography texts like Atlas Geographus as well as buccaneer narratives like William Dampier’s A Voyage Round the World and Woodes Rogers’ A Cruising Voyage Round the World and fictional texts like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, they have not discussed to any extent how narrative was an integral part of Moll’s maps in The World Described. Numerous notations and comments, along with images, insets, and views, established a narrative framework for reading Moll’s maps which were clearly entangled with the scientific, artistic, political, diplomatic, military, and economic concerns of his day. This article examines the interplay of line, word, and image in selected Moll maps and explains how they combined appeals to scientific accuracy, profitable enterprise, and national good to form a narrative in support of British imperial endeavor that foregrounded British foreign economic, political, and territorial interests in an age of fierce imperial rivalries.

Creating a “Micro-Colony” Within a Protectorate: The Example of the French Concession of Tourane (Đà Nẵng), 1884–1889

Although history ultimately favored the portuary development of SàiGòn and HảiPhòng, it was Tourane (ĐNẵng) that was the initial target of French colonial ambitions in the Indochinese peninsula. For over a century (17401858), its bay and territory had been the scene and the epicenter of Franco-British overseas imperial rivalries, a fact which actively fostered an entire set of colonial images about the site, which was quite often referred to as potential base to serve the interests of commerce and the Navy. Despite these ambitions nurtured over a long period, it was only after the conquest of Tonkin, thirty years after the Cochinchina expedition, that its territory was finally established as a concession: on 3 October 1888, the French were finally seizing juridical control of Tourane.
 As a conceded territory, Tourane was essential to French colonial and imperial designs. The focal point of political and economic ambitions, it was both a gateway and a means to prepare and support the French colonial project in Indochina. A hybrid and previously unknown template, the conceded territory model designed for, and from, Tourane indeed allowed the French to implement new strategies to tighten colonial rule in Indochina.
 Offering an unprecedented analysis on the creation of the French concession of Tourane at the end of the 19th century, this research examines the political context during which it was conceived, the work and conclusions given by the commission in charge of studying its borders and jurisdiction, and the steps taken by the colonial administration in order to seize definitive control of a strategic territory inside what was then left of the Đại Nam Kingdom. All in all, comparing Tourane with others treaty ports, it shows how and why its territory stood out as a micro-colony in a protectorate territory (Annam-Tonkin).

The Road to 1898: On American Empire and the Philippine Revolution

ABSTRACT ‘1898’ marks the birth of both the American empire and the Filipino nation when the U.S. Navy joined forces with Filipino revolutionists in ending Spain’s rule. The alliance ended when the Americans refused to recognise the Filipino republic and forcibly occupied the islands. Hopkins situates both the ‘coming of age’ of America and the rise of a Filipino nationalist elite against a wider backdrop of imperial rivalries, economic transformations, and stages of globalisation in which the British Empire looms large. The essay builds on Hopkins’s account of Spanish rule leading to the Revolution. In contrast to Cuba, the Philippine interior was left relatively untouched, controlled mainly through the friar-curates who lorded it over the town centres but not their peripheries. Following upon Hopkins’s discussion of the three foundational nationalists – Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, and Emilio Aguinaldo – their differences can be explained by the peculiarities of the Spanish colonial system and how each of them related to their society.

The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World

The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World

The Troika’s (the U.S, Russia and China) Competitive Plans of Integration for Central Asia

The Central Asian hinterland had been the central point of the 19th century imperial rivalry between Russia and Britain. The importance of Central Asia remains the same, though the players and its dimensions have changed. Two aspects have increased the importance of Central Asia in global politics. First aspect is the geographical position of Central Asia, that the region is landlocked. Therefore, it requires developed overland connectivity routes to approach other states and markets. The second aspect is the abundance of gas and oil reserves in the area. The concept of control over integration is the soul of the current geostrategic situation of Central Asia. The three great powers such as China, Russia and USA are working on their integration plan to provide direction to the region and manipulate the region according to their desires and interests. The great powers try to increase their own influence and to deny it to others (competitors). The great powers struggle for control over the production and marketing of hydrocarbon resources, transit routes and their influence in the region. Competition and collaboration are manifest in the changing competition and competitive interests of the great powers. Beijing enjoys a favorable geographical position over the Washington and is close to the region. Beijing enjoys huge financial and economic leverage as compared to Moscow. China’s initiative is providing outlets to Central Asian Republics (CARs) and consequently, the region is rapidly coming under its influence.

Latin America

‘Latin’ America is a region constructed in a context of imperial rivalries and disputes about how to build ‘modern’ nations that made it an ‘other America’ distinct from ‘Anglo’ America. Bringing together people without previous historical contact, the diversity of its societies and cultures was increased by the transatlantic slave trade and later global immigration. Building on the constructive relationship that characterises the ties between socio-cultural anthropology and history in the region today, this entry discusses differences in colonial relations and cultural interaction between European, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American people in different countries and the role of anthropologists in nation-building projects that aimed to construct national identities around ‘mixing’. It shows how anthropologists came to emphasise the active role of subordinated social groups in making Latin America’s ‘new peoples’. Widespread agrarian conflicts and land reforms produced debates about the future of peasant farmers, but new forms of capitalist development, growing urbanisation, and counter-insurgency wars led to an era in which indigenous identities were reasserted and states shifted towards a multicultural politics that also fostered Afro-Latin American movements. Anthropology has enhanced understanding of the diversity, complexity, and contradictions of these processes. Latin American cities are characterised by stark social inequalities, but anthropologists critiqued the stigmatisation of the urban poor as ‘marginals’ and used their ethnographies to produce novel insights into the nature and determinants of urban violence and the role of criminal organisations. Other areas in which Latin American anthropology has been innovative are analyses of transnational relations and new social movements, including women’s movements and feminism, although issues of gender, religious transformations, and cultural mixing run through this entry’s entire discussion, which concludes with Latin American debates about the decolonisation of anthropology itself.

Comrades on Elephants: Economic Anti-Imperialism, Orientalism, and Soviet Diplomacy in Afghanistan, 1921–23

Comrades on ElephantsEconomic Anti-Imperialism, Orientalism, and Soviet Diplomacy in Afghanistan, 1921–23 Samuel J. Hirst (bio) A 1923 cover of the magazine Ogonek displays two Afghans and a third man in Soviet military clothing assisting a Russian couple in broad-brimmed hats onto an elephant (fig. 1). The headline proclaims the scene anti-British and anti-imperialist, but the image could easily adorn a Victorian celebration of empire. The photograph is emblematic of the time Fedor Raskoĺnikov and Larisa Reisner spent in Kabul: they urged Moscow to provide diplomatic and economic aid to the Afghan state while they themselves collected antique coins to take home with them when they left. Raskoĺnikov and Reisner demonstrated a pronounced sense of cultural superiority during their stay in Kabul, and they seem almost to embody the paradox that has led scholars to refer to the Soviet Union as an “anti-imperialist ‘empire.’”1 Yet Raskoĺnikov, Reisner, and the editors of Ogonek evidently saw little incongruity in their performance. The magazine confidently drew readers’ attention to the Soviet presence in a 19th-century site of imperial rivalry, to a landscape that evoked the Great Game. Sightseeing on elephants was an exotic but irrelevant sideshow; the radicalism of the Soviet Union’s approach to independent states in what was to become the Third World lay elsewhere. The Bolsheviks cared most about economics, and they were convinced that the imperative to consolidate political independence from and against a global capitalist system defined anti-imperialism. Raskoĺnikov and Reisner were part of the Bolshevik elite, and they promulgated its economic analysis even as many of their gestures evoked another [End Page 13] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. On 10 June 1923, Ogonek featured this photograph of Larisa Reisner and Fedor Raskoĺnikov in Afghanistan and described the couple as “A Thorn in Lord Curzon’s Side.” Just a couple of months earlier, British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon had demanded Raskoĺnikov’s recall from Kabul on the grounds that the latter was engaged in anti-British activities. Source: Rossiiskaia natsionaĺnaia biblioteka, St. Petersburg. Reproduced with permission. [End Page 14] world and time. The moment of transition to a new order offers a revealing view of the often uneasy fit of revolutionary ideology and cultural bias. Early engagements with Afghanistan were part of a broader process in which the Soviet Union and its diplomats generated principles and practices that were to play out in Soviet relations with formerly colonial or semicolonial states for much of the 20th century. Between the summer of 1921 and the fall of 1923, Raskoĺnikov and Reisner learned to practice anti-imperialist diplomacy on the ground and on the fly. Their Kabul sojourn began not long after they had led Soviet troops into northern Iran in support of the short-lived republic in Gilan, and they had little prior knowledge of this new posting.2 In Afghanistan, they had to reconfigure their revolutionary dreams. Raskoĺnikov and Reisner brought struggle from the battlegrounds of world revolution to negotiating tables with capitalist states and with states that, like Afghanistan, were nonsocialist but oppressed. Afghanistan had just fought the British Empire for its independence, and the couple drew on a Bolshevik ideology in which Lenin had identified imperialism as a phase of capitalism characterized by competition among industrialized, imperialist states.3 But Lenin’s key work on imperialism addressed the intra-European conflict of World War I, not the struggle within empires of colonies and metropoles. Lenin’s retrospective diagnosis of imperialism endured long beyond the Great War and came to shape economic policies that defended Soviet Russia’s predominantly agricultural society against a predatory system. As a result, whether it was the protectionism manifested in the monopoly on foreign trade or the anxiety about sovereignty reflected in strict control of concessions to foreign companies, Soviet economic interactions with the West bore resemblance to those of contemporary nationalists in countries with little industry.4 Under Lenin’s tutelage, safeguarding economic independence rather than defeating reactionary armies became the battleground between socialism and capitalism.5 [End Page 15] Events on the ground in Kabul reinforced Lenin’s...

Sicily in a Mediterranean context: imperiality, Mediterranean polycentrism and internal diversity (6th-10th century)

The article offers a re-reading of the role played by Sicily in the Imperial rivalry opposing the Byzantine and Islamic empires in the Central Mediterranean, stressing the island’s specific Imperial dimension. With Justinian’s “Reconquista”, Sicily underwent a thorough ideological, social, economic, and strategic integration into the Byzantine empire, ultimately becoming a uniquely “Imperial” province, a status preserved under Islamic rule. The concept of Imperiality and its evolution between the 7th and the 10th century offers a useful heuristic tool to analyse the ideological, political, and economic importance of Sicily for Constantinople and the role of the island as a source of legitimacy for the Islamic polities in the Central Mediterranean. The reassessment of the archaeological data sheds light on the concrete consequences of this Imperial struggle on the settlement patterns over the same period, with the creation of a specific frontier zone, paving the way to new research into the process of internal territorial diversification of the island.

Ethnicity as a category of imperial racialization: What do race and empire studies offer to Romanian studies?

This article argues that the category of indigenous Romanian, which was articulated at the end of the 18th century can be better understood as a product of imperial racialization. Building on Katherine Verdery’s work, I analyze the production of the Romanian indigeneity within the context of imperial rivalries in the Habsburg empire. In doing so, I critically investigate the impact of Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism in Romanian studies, given that it introduced a sharp distinction between ethnicity and race. My argument opens up two new conceptual routes. On the one hand, it suggests a line of investigation comparing the formation of Romanian ethnicity with debates about white racial identity in North America. On the other hand, it makes visible the exclusion of Roma ethnicity from narratives about the origin of Romanianness. I conclude by drawing on larger consequences regarding, not only the question of race and stereotypes, but also by looking at the global process of forming the distinction between the indigenous and the foreign migrant.

Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians

The French Flag in Zanzibar Waters 1860s–1900s: Abolition and Imperial Rivalry in the Western Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT Between 1860 and 1900 British authorities repeatedly accused the French government of fostering the Indian Ocean illegal slave trade as France allowed dhows to fly her flag. This article intends to question the idea, still dominant in today's historiography, that the French flag was the key element explaining the persistence of the Indian Ocean slave trade and the failure of the British navy in stopping it. Using both British and French archives, this article confronts these arguments with new historical data. It will make clear that if dhows under the French flag played a substantial role in the Indian Ocean slave trade, they were far from being the crucial actor of this nefarious traffic. It also brings a new light on the history of the Indian Ocean slave trade and its abolition in showing the importance of British and French imperial preoccupations as well as its important impact on international law.

Origins and Characteristics of Macro‐Nationalism: A Reflection on Pan‐Latinism's Emergence at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

AbstractAppearing across Europe in the late nineteenth century, macro‐nationalist movements or pan‐movements – pan‐Latinism among them – participated in the ‘first globalisation’. During that period, European powers’ new domination of a considerable part of the world gradually homogenised the planet politically and economically. In this context, the pan‐movements placed nationalism on a larger scale than ever before. Mining various cultural, linguistic and ‘racial’ criteria, each macro‐nationalist movement promoted projects of supra‐national integration among all German‐speaking, Slavic‐speaking or Romance‐speaking peoples. Proposing a conceptual framework for analysing this phenomenon, this article situates macro‐nationalism within nationalism's broader history, underscoring similarities and differences in relation to the dominant model of nation‐state nationalism. I show how the pan‐movements drew constitutive elements from different phases in nineteenth‐century nationalism and became crystallised in a context marked by intensified armed conflicts and imperial rivalries. Focusing on the case of pan‐Latinism, I highlight the major role played by intellectual and political elites in this ideology's development and discuss the extent of its relevance to other social classes.

Meddling with Medals, Defending the Dead: Late Ottoman Soft Power from South Asia to North America

Before the Ottoman and British empires clashed on the battlefields of World War I, imperial rivalries between Istanbul and London often took more subtle forms. In the diplomatic realm, late Ottoman-British tussles were not limited to disputes over Ottoman territories and populations, but extended to Ottoman interventions in British domains as well. Utilizing archival and museum collections from Istanbul, New Delhi, New England, and Ottawa, this article contributes to a growing literature on late Ottoman extraterritoriality by probing Istanbul’s diplomatic and consular activities within two very different and distant British territories: India and Canada. First, the study examines discord between Istanbul and London over a seemingly innocuous yet increasingly sensitive issue: the Ottoman sultan-caliph’s conferral of honorary medals upon Indian Muslim notables. Second, the article pivots to the western hemisphere to explore Ottoman consular interventions surrounding the estates of Ottoman subjects who died in Canada. By considering examples of Ottoman ‘soft power’ in two far-flung regions of the world, the study contests one-dimensional narratives of extraterritoriality that fixate on European interventions in the Ottoman domains, or frame the Ottomans as passive spectators resigned to Western superiority in the Middle East, eastern Mediterranean, or other conventional geographies associated with Ottoman history.

‘A Latin Can Be Worth Just as Much or More than a Saxon’: Boxing, Gender, and Transnational Latinity in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Spain

This article examines Spanish press coverage of boxing upon its entry into Spain’s ‘media space’ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our analysis highlights how the mix of fascination, repugnance, and admiration displayed toward the sport were shaped by the broader context of imperial rivalry and anxieties about the purported decline of Spain and other Latin nations vis-à-vis the ascendant Anglo-Saxon nations. Criticizing boxing as brutish and barbaric provided defenders of Spanish identity and tradition with a means of challenging dominant racial and civilizational hierarchies. The bitterly ironic tone of most articles was reflective of the defensiveness engendered by the emasculating military defeats and economic struggles suffered by Spain and its Latin neighbors. Coverage of boxing, however, was not uniformly negative, as Spanish writers displayed admiration for successful French fighters, especially when they defeated Americans or Britons, as their achievements generated reassurance about the ongoing vitality of the Latin race. In this manner, media coverage of boxing served as a conduit for the articulation and transmission of understandings of identity and alterity that traversed national boundaries. Aside from having strong racial components, these understandings were deeply entwined with morally charged notions of masculine virility and cultural civility.

The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider

Reviewed by: The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider Matt D. Childs (bio) The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World elena a. schneider University of North Carolina Press, 2018 360 pp. In June 1762, Britain brought the Seven Years’ War to Havana, Cuba, the largest city in the Caribbean, the third largest in the Americas, and Spain’s gateway to its vast empire in mainland Latin America. Assembled outside of Havana’s harbor was a British force that would number 28,400 sailors, soldiers, and enslaved Africans—amazingly more people than lived in any British colonial city in the Americas at the time. After a six-week siege that even involved digging a tunnel under the famous Moro military fortress that guarded Havana’s deep harbor to dynamite its walls, the Spanish finally surrendered. The British would occupy Havana for nearly a year before it would be returned to Spain in exchange for Florida in 1763. Spain and Britain alike recognized the siege and occupation of Havana as a watershed moment in the history of the Atlantic world, often giving it as much historical weight as the arrival of Columbus in the 1490s and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Given the importance of the occupation of Havana for shaping Caribbean, Imperial, and Atlantic history, scholars have analyzed the event from military, political, economic, and diplomatic angles, which has produced a long and detailed historiography. Historian Elena Schneider’s The Occupation of Havana is the latest addition to this largest body of scholarship, and without a doubt it is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date. Other scholars have emphasized the importance of the siege and occupation of Havana, but mainly to illustrate a different story. For example, the event often figures as one of the last battles of the Seven Years’ War that forced Spain to the peace table, or the resistance by Cuban colonists is [End Page 499] highlighted as an early form of nationalism, or most frequently the economic changes initiated by the British during their brief occupation is portrayed as the first step in the development of the Cuban plantation system. Schneider breaks with this scholarly tradition whereby the occupation of Havana is leveraged to make an argument about a different historical topic. Instead, she explains that methodologically her study is a longue durée history of the preceding interactions between the British and Spanish in the Caribbean before the siege, a detailed narrative and analysis of the occupation and of the long-lasting consequences after Havana returned to Spanish rule. In developing this line of analysis, Schneider has performed exhaustive research in over two dozen archives in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean working in sources that range from papers relating to heads of state discussing political and military events down to the minutiae of individual sale transactions recorded by notaries. Drawing on this diverse source base, she skillfully juggles multiple levels of analysis that range from the macro analysis of global-structural events to the micro scale of individual actions by the enslaved produced out of contingency and expediency. Utilizing these sources and examining the occupation of Havana from a long historical view, Schneider argues that “the British invasion and occupation of a Spanish colonial space was not the radical rupture in Cuban history that it was once depicted as being . . . [but rather] the intensification of existing patterns and processes of interactions . . directly connected to slavery, the slave trade, and population of African descent . . . before during and after the events that transpired in 1762 and 1763” (9). In buttressing her argument on how the occupation of Havana was an intensification of preexisting patterns and accelerated interactions between colonies and empires in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Schneider has structured her book through six detailed chapters separated into three parts. In part 1, “Origins,” the author provides an intellectual and cultural history of what she wittingly labels the “Deep History of British Plots against Havana,” which traces schemes, conspiracies, and actions to take Havana and New World Spanish lands fueled by religious and imperial rivalries. Collectively, these early...

A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera by Amir A. Afkhami

Reviewed by: A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera by Amir A. Afkhami Robert Peckham Amir A. Afkhami. A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xiv + 276 pp. Ill. $54.95 (978-1-4214-2721-8). From 1817, a cholera epidemic that began in Bengal diffused across much of the Indian Subcontinent and along the proliferating pathways of global trade that had opened up in the wake of European—above all, British—imperial expansion. By 1820, cholera had reached China and a year later it was reported in the Middle East. Amir A. Afkhami's A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera examines the impact of cholera on the development of modern Iran. The book develops three interconnected arguments. First, in the spirit of Charles Rosenberg's classic study The Cholera Years, Afkhami suggests that Iran's epidemics provide a "sampling technique" to throw into relief entangled social, political, and economic processes.1 In his own words, cholera furnishes a "prism" for "showing the multiple, and often contradictory, social and political determinants of medicine and public health" (p. 3). Second, he contends that Iran's transition to modernity under the Qajar dynasty (1796–1925) created new conditions that in turn produced novel susceptibilities to disease. In particular, centralized government and the country's integration into burgeoning transnational trade networks facilitated cholera's spread and endemicity. Third, Afkhami tracks cholera's impact on the country's institutional developments across domains: from medicine, sanitation and hygiene, to social and political milieus. In other words, he claims that [End Page 143] cholera acted as a catalyst for institutional changes that looped back to influence how the disease was itself understood and experienced. There is an apparent tension, here, between the different roles assigned to cholera. If cholera is a "prism," can it simultaneously be a catalyst for transformation and an ontological object of study in its own right? The answer, as Rosenberg maintains, is yes, and Afkhami carefully braids these multiple cholera narratives into his singular but multi-layered history. While the comma-shaped cholera bacterium (Vibrio cholerae) that, when ingested, can cause fatal infection, is the subject of his book, cholera is also a methodological tool for making visible intermeshing social, political, and economic processes linked to modernity. Cholera, in other words, enables the historian to have her cake and eat it. The book, which draws impressively on a wide range of original sources, is organized chronologically, albeit with cross-cutting themes. Afkhami begins by mapping the institutional developments that marked the early period of Qajar rule as Iran opened up to international currents and modernized. He shows how these transformations were connected to a growing public health consciousness among the governing elites. Hygienic modernity was both reflective and constitutive of new social, political, and economic configurations. The cholera outbreaks of 1889 and 1892 serve as case studies for demonstrating how existing disease susceptibilities were amplified by Iran's progressive incorporation into a steam-driven international marketplace. Iranian responses to cholera, Afkhami concludes, were shaped by a wider geopolitics as imperial powers, notably Great Britain and Russia, jostled for spheres of influence across Asia. This power politics was played out, particularly at the turn of the-century during the Third Plague Pandemic, in the realms of sanitary imperialism. A recurrence of cholera in 1904 is used to illustrate the impact of new microbiological models of disease causation and transmission on Iranian society. Afkhami considers the espousal by local administrations and civic groups of Western-inspired sanitarian measures, highlighting the staunch opposition to them by a religious leadership. The failure of the Qajar administration to contain cholera led to increasingly strident calls by revolutionaries for government reform. At the same time, attempts to modernize Iran's health system by a constitutional government were overshadowed by imperial rivalries. The country's embroilment in a "Great Game" politics ultimately reduced its status, Afkhami argues, to that of a "proto-colony." A Modern Contagion provides a fresh perspective on cholera's entwined local and global histories, opening up new avenues for comparative...

The 1852 Centaur Shipwreck: Law, politics and society in the Persian Gulf

The 1852 Centaur Shipwreck:Law, politics and society in the Persian Gulf Seema Alavi The Incident In 1852 Centaur—a 550-ton British merchant ship under the command of Captain William Taylor Salmon—set sail from Calcutta on a voyage to Bushire and Basrah in the Persian Gulf. Its owner was Haji Baba Tazim—a British Indian subject. She had an insured cargo of rice, sugar and 1,645 chests of indigo valued at about 12 lakh Indian rupees. She wrecked in dense fog 25 miles south of Rāʾs al-Ḥadd, located at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman where it enters the Persian Gulf above and meets the Indian Ocean below.1 The site of the wreck was 120 miles from Muscat and well within the territorial jurisdiction of its Sultan Sayyed Sa'id.2 Arabs mainly from the Banī Bū ʿAlī tribe looted her cargo. A passing sheikh of the Jeneba tribe, that was also involved in the plunder, offered his boat to carry the crew for 100 Maria Theresa dollars (hereafter, $MT) to the safety of Muscat.3 The Muscat sultan on the advice of A. Hamerton, the British consul, initiated an investigation to get to the bottom of the shipwreck.4 But his team was unable to reach the site because of bad weather and returned to Muscat. The damaged and plundered Centaur was set on fire by the tribes, making investigation impossible. The Context Observers noted that the looted Bengal indigo comprised the entire annual stock that was consumed in the Persian Gulf. This may well have been the case as Indigo—the vivid blue pigment produced from plants belonging to the genus Indigofera—, indigenous to many tropical and subtropical parts of the world including India, was of high value in the region. In the Persian Gulf societies it was used to dye cloth, and also as a pigment for body paint by tribes of the Arabian Peninsula at weddings and festivities. It also had medicinal value. Temporally and spatially the Centaur shipwreck can be located in a specific moment in Omani history when its political sovereignty was contested by Britain, which was determined to control the Western Indian Ocean. By the mid-nineteenth century Oman's economy was booming. The reduction in the European slave trade due to the anti-slavery campaign of Britain diverted slave labor and capital to the hands of Arabs, who invested it in Omani clove and date plantations.5 This increased Britain's resolve to interfere and have an upper hand in the ocean. The internal tensions within the Sultanate offered the perfect canvas for British intervention and competition: royal family feuds, ambitions of Omani political and religious leaders, the Arab tribes and the Wahabi incursions. The Argument It is in the backdrop of these imperial rivalries that the claims for the recovery and reparation of indigo assumes special significance. Historians have written the history of commodities, like indigo, that moved across the Indian Ocean as integral to the story of colonialism and capitalism.6 Recent histories offer a more textured view of imperialism by putting the spotlight on the Indian Ocean as a transregional space of exchange where itinerant communities created legal regimes that sustained their commercial and social exchanges with political implications.7 Other works explain the working of different forms of "customary law" at sea to explain incidents of piracy, and the role of the loot and plunder that followed shipwrecks in building the political economy of tribes.8 This essay enriches these legal histories of the ocean by detailing the microhistory of law as reflected in the unfolding of the Centaur story. The many different experiences of individuals impacted by the same mishap but located in different geographical, social and political contexts offers a thick connectedness of things on scales both small and large.9 The movement of the looted indigo and the fight for its recovery and reparation made the Persian Gulf the main site of social interaction for three sets of people: the merchants, ship-owners and underwriters; the sultans, the Arab sheikhs and the tribes; and the British political agents and legal experts. It became a critical social space of...

The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876 ed. by Roseann Bacha-Garza, Christopher L. Miller, and Russell K. Skowronek

Reviewed by: The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876 ed. by Roseann Bacha-Garza, Christopher L. Miller, and Russell K. Skowronek Robert Wooster The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876. Edited by Roseann Bacha-Garza, Christopher L. Miller, and Russell K. Skowronek. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. 326. Photographs, notes, index.) In 2014, the Contributors Committee of the Community Historical Archeology Projects with Schools agreed to endorse the creation of the Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail, incorporating sites in Cameron, Hidalgo, Kleberg, Starr, Webb, and Zapata Counties. Combining written descriptions, a website, audio tours, podcasts (in Spanish and English), road signs, a short film, and a tour guide called Blue and Gray on the Rio Grande: The Rio Grande Civil War Trail (Texas A&M University Press, 2018), the project aims to publicize key Civil War sites and museums, promote cultural awareness, and increase heritage tourism. In so doing, it serves as a model for regional public history ventures. Featuring eleven essays by academic and public historians, museum and National Park Service officials, archeologists, and anthropologists, The Civil War on the Rio Grande, as explained on the dust jacket, provides "the scholarly backbone to [the] larger public history project." Several key themes emerge. First, modern residents of the lower Rio Grande Valley are justifiably proud of the region's importance in the Civil War and rightly determined to see that a broader audience recognizes their story. Second, the region's volatile politics—factional disputes between Reds (generally pro-Confederate) and Blues (generally pro-Union); conflicts between regional caudillos; imperial rivalries between the United States, France, and Mexico; and struggles for Mexican supremacy between Imperialists and Republicans—produced complex outcomes unique to the Valley. Third, the Civil War provided temporary economic opportunities, adroitly exploited by largely European and Anglo entrepreneurs but of little benefit to average laborers. Fourth, soldiers and the force of arms eventually determined the fate of the Rio Grande Valley. Finally, racial, ethnic, and national identity remained crucial throughout the Civil War era. Anyone who has had experience in any aspect of producing a book of essays understands the inherent problems involved. The present book thus seems something less than the sum of its individual parts. The book's somewhat quirky organization leads to considerable redundancies. Three essays, for instance, devote attention to the Union blockade, all of which could have benefitted from Robert M. Browning's Lincoln's Trident: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron During the Civil War (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Further, by including separate chapters on mercantile interests, the regional economy, and general overviews, on at least three occasions (77, 115, and 165), readers are reminded of a single contemporary newspaper's estimate that 320,000 bales of cotton had been exported [End Page 366] through Bagdad, Mexico, during the war years. Distinct essays on African American soldiers from Kentucky and the more general black military experience result in the same quotation from Sgt. Maj. Thomas Boswell, 116th United States Colored Infantry, appearing twice (204, 256). Finally, this reader could divine no apparent links between themes suggested in the opening essay regarding frontiers, borderlands, and borders, and the closing essay's championing of a "cubist" or a "conjunctive approach" (271) to history. Several essays are, however, quite valuable, most notably those by Mary Margaret McAllen on the era's key business life; Roseann Bacha-Garza on the complicated racial and ethnic relations of the region's mixed communities; Irving W. Levinson on the tangled diplomacy between Mexico and the United States; Jerry Thompson's discussion of Col. José los Santos Benavides and Gen. Juan Nepomuceno Cortina; and W. Stephen McBride's work on the Kentucky United States Colored Troops along the border. Featuring excellent research in the appropriate public, manuscript, and government primary documents, all can be read with profit by generalists and specialists alike, and the entire effort clearly demonstrates that Civil War South Texas offers opportunities for study far beyond the Battle of Palmito Ranch. Robert Wooster Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Mitsui Bussan and the Manchurian soybean trade: Geopolitics and economic strategies in China’s Northeast, ca. 1870s–1920s

This article examines how soybeans became a global commodity, by focusing on the intermediary role of the Japanese trading company Mitsui Bussan. In the early twentieth century, soybeans were almost exclusively grown in Northeast China, also known as Manchuria. Their global commodification was a result of complex imperial rivalries among China, Japan, and Russia in northeast China as well as the rapid rise of vegetable oil consumption in Europe. We demonstrate how Mitsui Bussan navigated the shifting geopolitical terrain by taking advantage of the competition between the Russian and Japanese empires, utilizing Chinese middlemen effectively, and securing support from the Japanese government and military. By placing the soybean trade in a geopolitical context, we shed light on how global commodity markets, trade, and international relations were intertwined.

Commentary. Nishida Kitarō and ‘The Principle of the New World Order’

This is a commentary on ‘The Principle of the New World Order’, a geopolitical essay written by Japanese Philosopher, Kitarō Nishida in 1944. This essay has been a source of postwar controversy over the philosophical justification of Japan’s involvement in the Second World War and the relationship between Japanese thoughts and Western colonial domination in Asia. As a text of Japanese formal geopolitics, the essay is a historical example to illustrate how Japanese academics geopolitically situated their country and themselves within the imperial rivalry during the War. The essay attracted not only criticisms that problematized Nishida’s approach to politics (imperialism and nationalism) and justification of the War, but also positive reviews that appreciated his proposal of a multicultural worldview countering Western modernity (i.e. the world dominated by the West). The translation of the essay is not easy to read but contains important insights into how to see the current world (dis)order under hegemonic powers.